Gears of War installation problem

[Jeivar]

A few months ago I bought and played Gears of War, and then uninstalled it to make room for another game. Today I decided to have another merry round of locust-genocide, only to run into a problem. I've deleted everything GoW-related off my computer, but it still pretends I still have it installed, and when I try to manually install or uninstall, it throws up the following:

"Error Number: 0x80040702
Description: Failed to load DLL: FirewallInstallHelper
Setup will now terminate"

. . . and since I'm utterly incompetent with computers, I have no idea what that means or what is going on. Is anyone familiar with this problem? Someone who can give me the Complete Idiot's Version of how to fix this?

[Lorn]

When you say you "deleted everything" do you mean you went into Program Files, selected Gears of War and pressed the delete button, or do you mean you uninstalled it through add/remove programs and deleted anything left over?

[Jeivar]

When you say you "deleted everything" do you mean you went into Program Files, selected Gears of War and pressed the delete button, or do you mean you uninstalled it through add/remove programs and deleted anything left over?

You know, I don't really remember how I uninstalled it originally. I just know that a search of anything named 'Gears of War' in my computer turned up nothing.

[Jeivar]

Um, anyone?

[Erloas]

Most of the Gears of War files will not having anything in the name you could identify. Pretty much only the folder some of it is in and the executable. Most games have all of their necessary files in the main folder and subdirectories, so as long as you deleted that it should get all of them. However sometimes games will have some files that are used but stored in other places, such as a common files folder that all games from that developer use and put in their own folder area.

The other thing is that any install of a game will write information into the registry about the game, what files are associated with it, where its installed, etc. If you just delete the files without uninstalling then those registry entries will still be there. That is likely what happened to you, the files are gone but the registry still thinks the game is installed. You can go into the registry and remove those entries manually, but if you don't know much about computers I wouldn't recommend it because you can screw up other things if you remove the wrong things in the registry. Sometimes registry cleaner applications will find and remove registry entries that are tied to files that no longer exist and that might fix your problem.

[grinner666]

There's a free program called CCleaner you can download that has a good registry cleaner function. If old registry files is what's causing the problem, maybe downloading and running that will help.

:smallsmile: